One of the most critical pieces of setting up a website which you want to rank well in search engines is choosing a strong domain name for your site.
How most people choose their domain name poorly
A lot of people go with the name of their store, which doesn’t work so well unless your store has excellent name recognition or a name which contains the keywords that people are looking for.
By way of example, if you sell antique books and your store name is Brins Treasures, unless you have the name recognition of coca cola, walmart, etc., having your primary domain named www.brinstreasures.com is not the best way to go.
A better way to choose your domain name
Instead, your main domain name should have something to do with the words that people actually search on. Rather than guessing and choosing something like www.brinsantiquebooks.com, you should spend the little bit of extra time, effort, and energy required to make sure you pick the strongest domain name possible.
If you have not done so, and are unfamiliar with keyword research in general, be sure to read "Basic Keyword Research for Targeted marketing before continuing.
For this example, you might go to the Google Keyword Tool and enter “antique book” as your initial phrase, which would give you results on searches related to antique books as well as additional keywords to consider, among which you would find “used books”, “collectible books”, “old books”, and “rare books”.
Adding those phrases to your search and re-running it, you would get something akin to the following:
Looking over the global monthly search volume, we find that used books, collectible books, old books, rare books, and antiquarian collectible books all have more people searching for them than antique books…so better choices for a domain name might be
- brinsusedbooks.com
- brinscollectiblebooks.com
- brinsoldbooks.com
- brinsrarebooks.com
- brinsantiquariancollectiblebooks.com
Checking the competition
Of course, before making a final decision on your domain name, you should also take a look at your competition
To do so, pop each keyword into google and search on it. Make sure to enclose each phrase in quotes so that only potentially relevant pages show up.
Used books shows some pretty stiff competition with 38.8 million results and having abebooks, alibris, barnsandnoble, and half show up in the top four spots…in addition to three paid ads above the results.
Collectible books is a bit more accessable, with only 4.2 million results and no paid advertisements…but it still has powells, abebooks, cdickens, and biblio in the top four spots.
Old books looks even better, with 3.5 million results, one paid advertisement at the top of the results and rbms and alibris being the top competition.
Rare books also has some stiff competition, with 10 million results, no paid advertisements on top of the search results, and abebooks, alibris, and amazon coming in as your top competitors.
Personally, I would try to go with a smaller niche if I wanted to compete in such markets, but if I had to use a broad selection I would choose collectiblebooks or oldbooks as part of my domain name. Both get good search volume and the natural search results competition is not nearly as tough as it is for either used books or rare books.
Branding Considerations
If you really want your store name as a domain, register one domain as shown above via keyword research and a second domain with your store name.
Then, use the keyword domain for setting up your site and park your branding domain on top of it. For this example, perhaps you pick two domain names:
- BrinsTreasures.com
- BrinsCollectibleBooks.com
Setup your site on BrinsCollectibleBooks.com and then park BrinsTreasures.com on top of it so that both domain names point to the same site.
For search ranking purposes, you would then focus on your researched domain name, trying to get links to your site named "Collectible Books" or "Brins Collectible Books".
